Word: side
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fairly detailed explanation of how it took its epoch-making pictures. Lunik III, a notably sophisticated mechanism, proved to be a top-shaped 614-lb. object incrusted with antennas and solar cells, and packed with instruments. As Lunik passed 4,000 miles below the moon's south side, the moon's gravitation tugged at it, pulling it upward (south to north) and behind the moon. This was as planned, the Russians said, so that when Lunik III returned to earth it would come closest to the Northern Hemisphere, where radio stations on Soviet territory could communicate with...
Lunik's course and timing were chosen, the Russians said, so that on the far side it would come close to a line drawn between the moon and the sun. As it approached the line, an electronic signal from the earth started its automatic machinery-and all sorts of things began to happen. Lunik was spinning (for directional stability) with one of its ends pointing roughly toward the sun; the first thing the orienting mechanism did was to stop the spinning, probably by ejecting small spurts of gas through nozzles. Then optical viewing devices looking through ports...
...Some of this operation was automatic, but marks on the moving film, the Russians said, caused radio signals to be sent to the earth and enabled Soviet scientists more than a quarter of a million miles away to control the picture-snapping and photo-finishing process on the far side of the moon...
After all its film was exposed, an automatic mechanism set Lunik to spinning again, so that sunlight during its journey would not scorch one side while the other side froze and upset the delicate mechanism inside. Then, having gone around the moon, Lunik swung back toward the earth, began to transmit the pictures. A slow system was used when Lunik was still at a great distance from the earth, a faster system when it came nearer and its signals were easier to receive. The transmission was done by a sort of TV camera that scanned the pictures electronically, line...
...Dreams. The moon pictures released so far look fuzzy, but experts consider them extraordinarily good, considering the fantastic difficulty of getting them at all. To laymen, the moon's far side, long populated by storytellers with strange beasts and weird civilizations, looks disappointingly like its visible side. But astronomers find it surprisingly different. They point to the comparative lack of the big, roundish, dark "seas" that are so common on its known face. The area newly pictured shows only one really big sea, which the Russians named the Sea of Dreams. A smaller sea they named...